July 2016

Mapping gravel roads in flood-prone areas amidst talk of guerrilla ambushes was not what I had imagined when I signed up as a climate change specialist for the World Bank. But if my first trip to the Zambezia and Nampula provinces in northern Mozambique is any indication of what life as a World Banker is going to be – my teenage Indiana Jones fantasies may well come true!

It all started innocently enough when I was hired to support a project in Mozambique focused on improving the conditions of feeder roads to foster agricultural production. The northern provinces of Zambezia and Nampula are major agricultural producers for the country, but also highly flood-prone. The Zambezi, Ligonha and Molocue rivers flood almost every rainy season, rendering significant elements of the road network impassable, sometimes for months. A changing climate could increase the severity and frequency of extreme rainfall – further exacerbating flood risks. Our goal was to identify elements of the unmapped, “unclassified” feeder network which could be improved to provide network redundancy, and thus improve road system resilience to flooding. It quickly became clear that the first step in evaluating an unmapped network is to map it, so I spent the last two weeks in Mozambique working with the government to do just that.

Ideas about what is important gain currency in the international development community with the regularity of ocean waves reaching the shore. As yesterday’s important idea recedes back into the ocean, today’s idea laps at our feet. A few years ago, the idea of country ownership came up in nearly every conversation about health information system (HIS) strengthening. We wanted to be sure that systems were not just dropped on a country, and that the country in question would value the system enough to use it and maintain it. After a few years, the salience of country ownership gave way to the idea of sustainability. The two terms share some elements—both express an interest in long-term maintenance. But this particular notion of sustainability explicitly included the transition of funding from donors to host governments.

In the past decade, much effort and attention has gone into media (including traditional types and digital technologies) research because the media are considered pivotal for social change and fundamental to human rights. Although several approaches exist to conduct media research; many researchers and policy makers use findings from publicly available survey data to conduct analyses, evaluate and make predictions. This data is often generated by large national or global (often wave-based) surveys that use random sampling techniques to interview respondents.

Given that the media and its effects generate so much interest, you would think that interesting and thought-provoking questions would be asked on media usage and user perceptions in these surveys. Surprisingly, that is not the case. Questions that tap into versatility, scope, ideas, usage and media perceptions in global survey research are quite uncommon. Interestingly, many surveys actually only incorporate items regarding media sources and usage frequencies alone.

Consider two primary sources of global attitudes and values research involving several countries: World Values Survey (WVS) and Afrobarometer.

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

The IMF Confronts Its N-Word
Foreign Policy
The research department of the International Monetary Fund dropped a political bombshell last month. The furor was set off by the publication of an article — “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” — that sparked a near-panic among advocates of free market policies and celebrations among their critics. The piece concluded that, over the past 30 years, the proponents of the economic philosophy known as “neoliberalism” have been systematically overselling the benefits of the two planks at its heart — namely, fiscal austerity during economic slowdowns and the deregulation of financial markets.

Bridging data gaps for policymaking: crowdsourcing and big data for development
DevPolicy Blog
Good data to inform policymaking, particularly in developing countries, is often scarce. The problem is in part due to supply issues – high costs, insufficient time, and low capacity – but also due to lack of demand: policies are rarely shown to be abject failures when there is no data to evaluate them. The wonderful phrase “policy-based evidence making” (the converse of “evidenced-based policy making”) comes to mind when thinking about the latter. However, technological innovations are helping to bridge some of the data gaps. What are the innovations in data collection and what are the trade-offs being made when using them to inform policy?

Clearly, a lot of what has gone wrong with cities is related in one way or another to housing. The future of urbanization will therefore depend on how countries and cities position housing as a priority in the public debate around sustainable development.

From slums to gated communities, from overcrowding to sprawl, from homelessness to the vacant houses, there is much evidence that housing is shaping cities worldwide, regretfully, in many cases, by producing fragmentation and inequalities. The resulting models are leading to social, environmental and financial costs far beyond what the majority of cities can afford.

While the most common problem is the shortage of adequate and affordable housing and the unprecedented proliferation of slums, other important challenges lay in the poor quality and location of the stock usually far from job and livelihood opportunities, lack of accessibility and services. The housing challenge the world is facing today is likely to persist with six out of every ten people expected to reside in urban areas by 2030. Over 90 per cent of this growth will take place in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. It is estimated that the struggle to obtain adequate and affordable housing could affect at least 1.6 billion people globally within a decade.

We cannot overlook this reality. This is why, towards Habitat III, UN-Habitat has increased efforts to re-establish housing as a priority in the debate around sustainable urbanization. We are proposing the 'Housing at the Centre' approach to shift the focus from simply building houses to a holistic framework where housing is orchestrated with national and urban development in a way that benefits all people.

Equipped with unique tourist destinations, a strong national brand, and favorable trade positions with developed countries, Nepal is a country full of untapped potential. But several obstacles are holding it back from being a modern and globally connected economy. Some of these are unavoidable, such as its remote and landlocked location. But others, including outdated and restrictive trade and investment policies, lack of sufficient infrastructure, and a low capacity for adhering to quality standards for exports, could be resolved with a more modern trade framework.

Small towns* typically have not been well served by national or regional water utilities. Decentralization has become increasingly widely adopted, but even if local governments at the small town level have the power to operate a water utility, they often lack the capital and skills to do so. In response, some local governments and public institutions concentrate improvements on upgrading public utilities’ operations or strengthening community based management. In other cases, they choose to bring in the private sector knowledge of how to get clean water and sanitation services to more people more efficiently, affordably or sustainably. There is no one solution to addressing often very complex water and sanitation challenges.

There are many ways in which the public sector can leverage its own resources through partnering with the private sector. For the domestic private sector to fully realize its potential at scale in the small town sub-sector, we found they need capable and enabled public institutions to structure the market and regulate private operators.

In Côte d’Ivoire, only 15% of savings are allocated to financial institutions such as banks, microfinance companies, and mobile money accounts.

The wealthy can borrow money to finance their investment needs because bankers trust them. Those who are less well off, and who need loans the most, do not have this access and must call upon the solidarity of their family and community to finance their investments. The same logic can be used at the country level. High income countries borrow, while many poor African countries have a limited access to international capital markets. In recent years, only one fourth of sub-Saharan African countries were able to issue international bonds—and do not have any other alternative but to solicit international aid.

Sophie Romana (left) and Shelley Spencer (right) report back from the June 8 high level roundtable organized by NetHope and USAID, which brought together mobile banking and gender champions to reflect on how Digital Financial Services (DFS) can galvanize women’s empowerment.

Women’s empowerment is often measured by their access to resources and ability to make decisions over how they are used. Recent evidence shows that DFS delivered through mobile phones deserves solid A's against each metric. This is not just hopeful musing by us as two empowered women with banking apps on our mobile phones, it is the consensus of a cross section of thought leaders with a seat at the table in Washington including USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Better than Cash Alliance and UNCDF, CGAP, and Women for Women International, as well as our own organizations, Oxfam and NetHope. We recently spent a morning reflecting on rigorous academic and implementation research on DFS use by women — all to be published soon — and pathways to close the gender gap in DFS product use.

Oxfam has long known that women play a central role in financing family and community needs. What we are now finding is that DFS tools can enhance their role. To study the impact of DFS on Saving for Change (SfC) savings groups in Senegal, Oxfam divided up 210 SfC groups (over 5,000 women) into 2 cohorts: one who participated in the project and the other as a comparison set. Women who participated in the pilot saved and borrowed more than the comparison groups. The differences are not marginal. There is a significant difference in savings.

India is home to the largest number of poor people in the world, as well as the largest number of people who have recently escaped poverty. Despite an emerging middle class, many of India’s people are still vulnerable to falling back into poverty, making the country uniquely placed to drive global poverty reduction. In the last few weeks, a new blog series analyzed publicly available data to better understand what has driven poverty reduction from the mid-1990s until 2012, and the potential pathways that can lead to a more prosperous India. Learn more